“Mr. Turner” Review: Fan… It Was Weird… Guess Its Nap Time

Well shit… I can’t blame Mike Leigh (Happy-Go-Lucky) as being a bad director, because I actually have liked a lot of his movies and recognize that he is a top tier director. I also am not going to get into a long rant about how long the movie is for two reasons.

First, biopic period pieces are almost always ridiculously long. Second, I don’t believe that the length of a film should ever be used to judge a movie for being good or bad. With that being said, I slept during the first half hour of Mr. Turner, pretending I was watching Whiplash, which could be heard loud and clear from the theater next store.

That or Timothy Spall (Harry Potter) groping his housekeeper, within minutes of the start of the film, should of alerted me that “fan” the movie would be. While there was some great cinematography inspired by Mr. Turner’s work along with some very good acting, I had very little interest in the movie.

The movie was just weird. Honestly, I couldn’t think of any other way to describe it. The housekeeper was a more pathetic sex slave than Channing Tatum in Foxcatcher (a dynamic that actually made sense) and was sadly funny.

I have to steal the comparison a good friend of mine used about the character of Mr. Turner being an unlikeable yet interesting character like Walter White – the problem is, I couldn’t care less what happened to Mr. Turner in the movie. I was waiting for him to die. And after so much random sex acts and painting repeating itself through the movie, I guess I didn’t need to stay until the end. Even though, it was a good change of pace when Mr. Turner sadly died.